Yesterday we started out early to catch a free tour of Chinatown that Gosia found on the web. We arrived at a tiny park whose name eludes me now 10 minutes before time, but found only a shitload of Chinese senior citizens there. No young, hip and beautiful free tour guides in sight. Eventually a middle-aged Chinese lady holding a CHINATOWN TOUR sign arrived with a whole bunch of little kids in tow, and we fell in behind her. That's how we were treated to a brief history of Chinese immigration at the 2nd grade level. After that was done, the Chinese lady declared that I would become her assistant in wrangling the children - at which point one of the school teachers explained that me and Gosia were actually not part of the children's group. This was when we realized that it was actually a special tour for some private school - and were promptly kicked out. Oopsie.
And so, we made our own tour with the help of Lonely Planet. I'd say it ended up being pretty OK. San Francisco is absolutely beautiful. I imagine the hill-after-hill aspect might get tedious really quickly if you live here, but when you're just visiting the whole city changes into a sequence of Places You Want to Live. Downtown is like New York convulsed into skyscraper canyons shrouded in fog. Simply beautiful. My favorite places are Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill - both pretty steep, and both looking very... pricy. Like the sort of places where you really want one of your friends to have a house or something, so you can visit, but don't have to actually pay for it.
Telegraph Hill is very green, with some buildings covered in flowering vines, and lots of various nooks and crannies. At the apex there's a tower that I took for a lighthouse (it's not, some eccentric lady donated it to the city to pretty it up. It worked). We didn't go inside, and instead plopped down on a nearby lawn, took in the sights, and ate our ginormous gourmet sandwiches from an Italian deli.
(Side note about food: we're finding it very difficult to eat more than one meal per day. The portions are simply enormous. And the things we do eat are delicious.)
Russian Hill is more Scandinavian dark wood tiered houses (you know, like the ones you see in those glossy design magazines) and an air of record exec opulence. We got to the top after sundown, and were treated to an amazing vista of the bay and the downtown area glimmering with lights, with the Bay Bridge actually shimmering because of some atmospheric thing that I probably should know an explanation for. And atop that hill stood a 30-floor high-riser with floor-to-ceiling windows. I can't even begin to imagine what the view must be from there.
We also went to the waterfront again. Visited a museum filled with old coin-operated arcade games, watched a whole bunch of sea lions lounging next to Pier 39, and finally took a nap in a small park right by the water, with a splendid view of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a mounted police lady texting someone on her phone, a bunch of twenty-somethings lounging about, and even some people swimming in the bay. It was perfect. And so sunny that I actually got my face and neck burned a bit.
After that bit of downtime we went into a really cool coffee shop nearby to do Work Things using free Internet. Nothing spectacular happened there, but I'm writing it down so it (hopefully) jogs my memory somewhere down the line, because I felt really happy there. The barista was very nice in a laid back sort of way, there was a very hot guy sitting right outside, and I was filled with sunshine.
On our way back (after Russian Hill, I got a bit achronological there for a moment) we decided to pop into a bar for a nightcap. And yes, the bar was great. Small-ish, nicely underlit, with a 30-something friendly bartender lady in a simple black t-shirt, and just beginning to fill up, so we had a nice little bay window table, and then moved to sit at the bar. I honestly don't know why I don't sit at the bar more often, it makes everything better. We had drinks, got very excited when The XX's Intro came on, as we both love it, and felt really good in each other's company (at least so I assume). It was a perfect ending to a perfect day. As stupid as it sounds after just 4 days, I can't imagine anything else topping it.
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